JIM
STEMPEL is the author of seven books, including
nonfiction, historical fiction, spirituality, and
satire. His articles have appeared in numerous journals
including North & South, HistoryNet, Concepts In Human
Development, New Times, Real Clear History, and the
History News Network. His exploration of warfare, The
Nature of War: Origins and Evolution of Violent Conflict
examined war from a psychological perspective, while his
newest novel, Windmill Point, was released to
considerable critical acclaim. He is a graduate of The
Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina, and lives with his
wife and family Maryland. Feel free to explore his
website at
www.jimstempel.com.

The stream of human
knowledge

is heading toward a
non-physical reality.

The universe begins to look
more

like a great thought

than a great machine.Sir James
Jeans

For at least two hundred
years science has been telling us that any ideas of spirituality we
might hold dear are little more than ignorant leftovers of a
superstitious past - foolish relics.

But the truth is, physics
itself, that most foundational of all sciences, has now progressed
far beyond that initial, dismissive assessment, to a conceptual
worldview far more accepting of spirituality than ever before.

To grasp the nuts and
bolts of this new science, then, is to understand the nuts
and bolts that support a new, evolving and far more sophisticated
grasp of spirit than has ever before been available to us.

This new conceptual framework is absolutely critical to our grasp of
spirit, and, frankly, for those previously unfamiliar with the
discoveries of modern physics, this new framework may at first seem
nothing short of "other worldly" itself - as the old saying goes,
the truth can at times be far stranger than fiction.

So let's start by taking
a close look at what
the new physics has to tell us.

In 1964 the scientific world was literally turned on its head by a
new theorem, but very few at the time understood just what had taken
place.

Indeed, so astounding
were the material, philosophical, and spiritual implications of this
assertion that it would soon be referred to as,

"the most profound
discovery in science." 1

Yet even today, few
beyond a small community of physicists have come to grips with its
meaning.

The conceptual
implications for particle physics were so extreme that for decades
after its announcement many within the scientific community resisted
its implications, as do some resist them to this day.

The theoretical contentions offered in 1964 have been confirmed and
replicated in laboratories across the globe on numerous occasions,
and today there is no question that the original assertion was
correct.

This monumental insight
is called
Bell's theorem, and the sea change
it caused in physics is still being digested as I write.

So central is Bell's
theorem to our understanding of the physical universe, how
it functions, and what that means for us as human beings,
that to grasp its implications is crucial for anyone interested in
the science that today enables us to envision universal processes as
far more than simply material phenomena.

Yet, simultaneously, to
truly grasp the new reality Bell's theorem implies, it is essential
that we first understand the old reality it so violently overturned.

Today many within the scientific community believe that our modern
science - that is, the science of observation and testing, of the
scientific method - was inaugurated in the seventeenth century when
Galileo Galilei first pointed his homemade telescope toward
the heavens and started poking around.

How did this new science
differ from previous approaches to the study of physical phenomena?

"Classical physics
began in the seventeenth century when pioneers such as Italian
mathematician Galileo Galilei, French philosopher Rene Decartes,
German astronomer Johannes Kepler, and English mathematician
(and alchemist) Isaac Newton advanced a new idea.

The idea was that
through experiments one could learn about Nature, and with
mathematics, describe and predict it. Thus rational empiricism
was born.

Classical physics was
extended and substantially refined in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries by luminaries like James Clerk Maxwell,
Albert Einstein, and hundreds of other scientists." 2

This physics - called
classical, or Newtonian, or material physics - has
made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the universe
we inhabit, and as a result has had a profoundly positive effect
upon the overall human condition.

Food production, health
services, economics, education, transportation, etc., etc., have all
been vastly improved as a result of scientific applications made
available through analysis and testing.

No doubt, material
science has been a boom to human kind.

Initially, this new science looked outward as had Galileo toward the
planets and stars for answers regarding how the universe worked and
the matter by which it was constructed.

Larger and better
telescopes were developed in order to augment this process, and
today, of course, spacecraft have been constructed that fly to
points distant enough to inspect and photograph distant terrestrial
bodies.

As a result, a great deal
has been learned.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries enormous strides were
made in terms of our understanding, not only of the greater cosmos,
but also of the physics by which it functions.

Most of the planets,
their orbits, and their relationship with the sun were established
early on.

The mathematical
calculations for all of this fit nicely within the prevailing
understanding, or model, of the universe, and all of these findings
both confirmed and augmented our grasp of Newtonian physics.

The Emergence
of Quantum Physics

Still, despite all the advances, there were some oddities that did
not quite fit.

In 1801, for instance,
British physicist Thomas Young conducted a "double-slit"
experiment in an attempt to deduce the true nature of light. Prior
to that, it was assumed that light was composed of small particles
of matter, but the result of Young's experiment seemed clearly to
indicate that light was in fact a wave.

It was presumed, as a
consequence, that light waves would require some sort of medium in
order to propagate (conceptualized as a luminiferous ether or ether
"wind"), and the search for this medium was promptly initiated.

Physics soldiered on
essentially unruffled by all of this, however, still confident in
its overall grasp of the universe. But this subtle medium, despite
numerous attempts at detection, remained elusive.

As a result, light continued to be a thorn in the side of Newtonian
physics, thus it was naturally toward the study of light that much
attention became focused.

In 1900, for instance,
American physicist Max Planck developed a mathematical model
that demonstrated that light appeared to exist as distinct bursts or
"packets" of matter.

Planck named these
packets "quanta" after the Latin quantus, which translates as
essentially "how much."

Planck's discovery proved
the birth of what we today call
quantum physics - that is, the
study of that group of infinitely small particles that ultimately
comprise all matter.

Then, in 1905, Albert
Einstein, an unknown physicist at the time working as a patent
clerk in Switzerland, clearly demonstrated the validity of Plank's
quanta, but it was a proof that also allowed that light had to have
both wave and particle characteristics - a perplexing side issue.

Quantum understanding snowballed rapidly.

Dean Radin tells us that,

"Danish physicist
Niels Bohr showed how the quantum concept could explain the
structure of the atom (1922 Nobel Prize).

In 1924, Louis de
Broglie proposed that matter also has wavelike properties (1929
Nobel Prize). In 1926, Erwin Schrodinger developed a
wave-equation formulation of quantum theory (1933 Nobel Prize)."
3

Our insight into quantum
mechanics was accelerating rapidly, but, despite all the progress,
the seemingly dual nature of light remained a vexing problem.

Was light comprised of
particles or waves? No one could say...

The Big Bang
Theory

Meanwhile, additional progress was being made at the observatory by
looking in the opposite direction - far out into the depths of the
universe.

In 1929, as an example,
by carefully analyzing the
redshifts (observed light
frequencies) of distant galaxies, American astronomer Edwin
Hubble demonstrated that the universe was expanding.

An expanding universe was
evidence contrary to the Steady State theory of the universe, or a
universe that was essentially constant and eternal.

Hubble's finding also
suggested that our universe, since it was now seen to be expanding,
may naturally have had a beginning; that is, a moment when all that
matter had been consolidated in a single point before it started to
expand.

Over time this "beginning" became conceptualized as what we today
call the Big Bang theory of the universe,
or a moment when the material universe emerged from a background of
utter nothingness in an enormous burst of heat, light, and matter.

The name actually came
from British astronomer Fred Hoyle, who quipped one day on
British radio that the theory sounded like little more than a "Big
Bang," and while this was stated in jest, the term stuck,
nevertheless.

The Big Bang theory
postulates that the universe emerged from a "singularity" (a point
of infinite density, which remains, frankly, beyond our current
physics to explain or, as humorist Terry Pratchett once quipped, "In
the beginning there was nothing, which exploded") some 13.8 billion
years ago as an incredibly small and incredibly hot point of matter.

According to the theory,
this material then inflated, expanded then cooled over time allowing
for the formation of light elements like hydrogen and helium.

Due to a slightly uneven
distribution of matter throughout the universe, gravitational
attraction then began to consolidate these elements into clouds
which over eons formed the stars, planets and galaxies that comprise
the celestial panorama we observe today in our night time sky.

Evidence supporting the Big Bang theory of creation then began to
accumulate.

This evidence included
the original "redshift" Hubble discovered, the discovery of cosmic
microwave background radiation (which had been predicted as a
residual product from the heat of the initial inflation), and more
recent redshift observations of distant supernovae indicating that
the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating (and which
suggest the existence
of dark matter in substantial
quantities as the driving force behind this acceleration).

This explanation of the Big Bang is, to say the least, a very brief
and general summary of a vast and complex event, but it serves our
purposes by bringing us forward conceptually to the year 1964, and
the model of the universe that was prevalent at the time Bell's
Theorem made its shocking appearance (minus the dark matter, which
was theorized later).

The truth of the matter is, however, while the Big Bang theory
provided the universe with both a beginning and a direction, it did
not alter the assumption that the universe was fundamentally a
material phenomena:

a belief central to
modern science ever since Galileo had peered through his
telescope.

History tells us, as an
example, that when asked by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early years of
the nineteenth century as to why his most recent treatise did not
mention the existence of God, the great French scientist
Pierre-Simon Laplace was said to have remarked,

"I had no need of
that hypothesis."

Later, and likewise,
Laplace explained to an admiring audience that,

"We may regard the
present state of the universe as the affect of its past, and the
cause of the future."

In other words, Laplace,
along with almost all other scientists at the time, believed that
the universe was little more than a vast, material machine, driven
by physical forces, and nothing more.

If, for instance, you
could determine the position and direction of every particle in the
universe at any given point in time, it would be possible, at least
theoretically, to crank that picture forward or backward, observing
as you did every event that had taken place in the past while
accurately predicting every event that would take place in the
future.

This view therefore
supported the notion of a deterministic universe, and a universe
that was devoid of either free will or human consciousness as a
result.

Importantly, this understanding, or model, of the universe rested on
certain suppositions that were accepted as true and universal by
material physics down through the years simply because the universe
appeared to function in accordance with them.

The Big Bang was
conceptualized as the beginning of an entirely material process that
had evolved over eons in accordance with the known parameters of
Newtonian (or classical, reductionist, or material) physics.

In that sense, the
universe was still perceived essentially as a vast, physical
mechanism, a machine that was now understood to be a bit more
complex than it had been conceived during the earlier days of, say,
Pierre-Simon Laplace one hundred and fifty years before, but
differing now only in terms of its sophistication, not its
fundamental nature.

Thus Laplace's statements
regarding the absence of God and the predictive power of the
original conditions still held true as far as modern physics was
concerned.

The universe was also considered to be a true, functioning reality,
and a reality that, having been put in motion by a natural (although
inexplicable) occurrence, remained utterly deterministic, events
formed and driven forward in time, no longer by the unseen hand of
God, but by random particle collisions alone.

All events occurred due
only to the action of physical forces in contact or proximity with
one another, and no force, field, or matter could - according to
Einstein's calculations - ever travel faster than the speed of
light.

But the
wave/particle nature of light still
remained an intellectual conundrum that, much like one rotten apple,
threatened to subvert the entire structure of physics if not
sensibly accounted for.

'Uncertainty
Principle' Neuters Newtonian Physics
Still, as far as the quantum theory was concerned, great new strides
were being made.

Physicist Nick Herbert
tells us, for instance, that,

"By the late
[nineteen] twenties physicists had constructed a quantum theory
adequate to their needs:

they possessed,
thanks to the work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Dirac,
rough mathematical tools that organized their quantum facts
to a remarkably accurate degree.

At this point
Hungarian-born world-class mathematician John von Neumann
entered the picture.

Von Neumann put
physicists' crude theory into more rigorous form, settling
quantum theory into an elegant mathematical home called 'Hilbert
space', where it resides to this day, and awarded the
mathematician's seal of approval to the physicists brand-new
theory of matter." 4

But the enigma of light
continued to plague quantum theory, and it is precisely here where
the old physics of determinism and cause and effect began to
unravel.

In 1927, for instance,
German physicist Werner Heisenberg authored his now famous uncertainty principle, the
intellectual consequences of which did great mischief to Newtonian
physics.

Heisenberg was at the
time attempting to measure the precise speed and position of a
particle in order to predict its future position - a process that
should have been entirely within the accepted parameters of
Newtonian physics.

"the more accurately
you try to measure the position of the particle, the less
accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa."

This finding sent shock
waves rippling through physics.

"Moreover," Hawking
tells us, "this limit does not depend on the way in which one
tries to measure the position or velocity of the particle, or on
the type of particle: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a
fundamental, inescapable property of the world." 5

In a very real sense,
Heisenberg's principle delivered a body blow to Newtonian physics.

Because, if the precise
state of the universe was impossible to measure at any given moment,
then any state either before or after was also impossible to
calculate.

It was as simple as that.
Laplace had been wrong.

Determinism, material
cause and effect, even the forward moving arrow of time surely
appeared to be "on the ropes." Suddenly, many of the underlying
presumptions upon which classical physics rested had seemingly
evaporated into thin air due to Heisenberg's principle.

What was going to replace
them?

Moreover, what did
Heisenberg's findings actually mean? How could it be that aspects of
the material universe were, had always been, and would always be,
utterly beyond our ability to measure?

And there was still more damage as a result of Heisenberg's new
principle. Because, if particles could not be clearly defined in
terms of their position and movement, then particles could no longer
be clearly defined as material objects anymore.

If, after all, the
position and movement of a particle could not be described with
precision, then in a sense a particle could only be described with
imprecision - a mathematical approximation.

A photon, for instance,
could no longer be considered a discrete particle, but rather
a combination -
part particle, part wave - or a
mathematical description now called a wave function.

Even more importantly, if
the manner by which a particle was measured (or observed) altered
the resultant observation (a fact Heisenberg had demonstrated), then
it followed logically that observation itself had to be a
fundamental aspect of reality.

Physics had been thrown
for a loop.

A World of
Pure Possibility… Magic
Indeed, some physicists, Heisenberg included, began to interpret the
wave part of the particle/wave aspect of light as meaning that
particles became particles only when observed, and remained waves
(that is, in a state of material potential) when not observed.

This, of course, was an
extraordinary claim, something that many physicists thought sounded
disturbingly akin to ancient superstition, like magic or
voodoo.

What Heisenberg and his
colleagues were suggesting, in essence, was that the unseen world
of quantum mechanics was not a material realm at all, but a
realm rather of pure potential.

That's right:

quantum researchers
like Heisenberg argued that the fountainhead of the physical
universe appeared to be utterly immaterial.

And as damaging as all of
this was to classical physics, even more shocking news was on the
way.

Because if the foundation
of our physical reality arose from a source of pure potential (was
not material at all), then what, exactly,

Was this
non-physical stuff?

Could it even be
called stuff?

At this point in
time many scientists became dizzy just trying to get a
handle on the facts, and who could blame them?

Nick Herbert
explains the next leap in logic that took place.

"If we take quantum
theory seriously, it seems to demand that the world before an
observation is made up of pure possibility.

But if everything
around us is only possible not actual, then out of what solid
stuff do we construct the device that will make our first
observation?

Either there are some
physical systems whose operations unaccountably evade the
quantum rules or there are nonphysical systems not made of
multivalued possibility, but of single-valued actuality -
systems that exist in definite states capable of interacting in
an observational capacity on indefinite quantum-style matter."

Yet it was clear that all
material systems consisted of particles, and that these particles
always obeyed the rules of quantum mechanics (not individually, but
in statistical aggregates), because these rules had been tested and
verified throughout countless experiments.

"On the other hand,"
Herbert continues, "we are aware of at least one nonphysical
system that not only can make observations but actually does so
as part of its function in the world - the psychological system
we call
human consciousness." 6

This assertion, while
sound mathematically and entirely logical, was so startling that it
literally turned classical physics on its head.

A science that had
accepted as utterly valid a universe constructed of, and driven by,
material particle movement was told suddenly that it had had it all
wrong from the very beginning.

And make no mistake about
it, that's exactly what was being said.

"The general idea of
von Neumann and his followers," Herbert explains, "is that the
material world by itself is hardly material, consisting of
nothing but relentlessly unrealized vibratory possibilities.

From outside this
purely possible world, mind steps in to render some of these
possibilities actual and to confer on the resultant phenomenal
world those properties of solidity, single-valuedness, and
dependability traditionally associated with matter.

This kind of general
explanation may be enough for philosophers, but physicists want
more. They want to know exactly how it all works, in every
detail." 7

Indeed, the notion that
our material realitywas
not real after all was simply too much for many
physicists, and their response at the time was entirely reasonable.

No determinism,
cause and effect, or arrow of time?

What was
happening to the foundational principles of classical
physics?

Many physicists tossed up
their hands in dismay, others in disgust.

One of those physicists
was the extraordinary Albert Einstein himself, the very
father of relativity theory, and the most respected physicist in the
world.

All of this sounded crazy
to Einstein.

As to the notion that the
universe was the construct of little more than the capricious whims
of human observation, he supposedly responded with the now famous
quote that,

"God does not
play dice with the universe."

Obviously, he did not
agree with the newest speculations of quantum physics.

Einstein bristled at these new interpretations of quantum theory to
the point that in 1935 he along with Boris Podolsky and
Nathan Rosen issued a thought provoking analysis now known as
the
EPR (Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen) paper.

This analysis was meant
to be a clear-headed challenge to the wave function description of
matter that had been adopted by many quantum physicists, and
described above.

The EPR paper insisted
that the position and momentum of any given particle had to be able
to be measured far more accurately than Heisenberg's principle
allowed for, or else information between certain "entangled"
particles (Erwin Schrodinger had previously demonstrated that when
quantum systems interact their wave functions become entangled, and
they will remain entangled even when no longer interacting) would be
theoretically transferred faster than the speed of light,
instantaneously in fact, which was a fundamental violation of
Einstein's theory of relativity.

According to the EPR
paper, hybrid particles like wave functions, and
instantaneous transmissions (what Einstein called "spooky action at
a distance") were inelegant solutions clearly out of line with
relativity theory, which was the accepted gospel of physics at the
time.

In that sense, then, the
EPR paper was issued as a direct challenge to quantum theory as it
was currently being developed.

Bell's Theorem
& a Nonlocal Universe

This was more or less the state of affairs in 1964 when John
Stewart Bell entered the picture.

Without going into great
detail, suffice it to say that Bell demonstrated in his theorem that
the EPR analysis was right, but that its conclusions were wrong, and
that superluminal (faster than light) entanglements were not only
possible, but required if quantum theory was to make sense.

Prior to this, physics
had always assumed the universe to
be local in nature, that is,
interactions between physical systems had of necessity to involve a
signal transferred by force at a rate below the speed of light.

Bell's theorem, on the
other hand, demonstrated that the universe was in fact nonlocal ("a
nonlocal effect is an interaction
that does not involve force, nor does it involve the transfer of
signals, and it happens instantaneously regardless of the distance
between objects"), 8 and as a consequence the "spooky
action at a distance" Einstein had argued against, was, in fact, a
foundational aspect of the universe.

Not only that, but within
a few years, and repeatedly, Bell's theorem was tested in the
laboratory, and found to be accurate.

The science was now
clear:

we live in a universe
that is nonlocal.

As Columbia University
physicist, Brian Greene, noted,

"This is an
earth-shattering result. This is the kind of result that should
take your breath away." 9

The fact is, this finding
has taken a good many people's breath away.

And if all of this is not weird enough for you, Philippe Eberhard,
then working at Berkeley, soon demonstrated that,

"no quantum
calculation will ever result in an observable superluminal
connection between the patterns of individual quantum events."
10

Nonlocal interactions are
thus built into the fabric of the universe, but in such a way that
we can never actually observe them.

But that does not mean we
cannot observe their effects.

For as Herbert explains,

"The present
situation seems to be as follows: quantum theory is superluminal
[faster than the speed of light], quantum reality is
superluminal, but quantum appearances are not…

Since quantum
theories of consciousness assume that the cause of individual
quantum events lies in the mental world and Bell's theorem
proves that the causes of some quantum events must be
superluminally connected, then we should expect to find some
mental events that behave like the Bell connection, that is,
human experiences that are unmediated, unmitigated, et cetera."
11

In the span of
approximately seventy-five years the world of particle physics had
been turned upside down, and the philosophical and spiritual
implications of this have yet to be fully digested by either science
or the public in general.

Indeed, the implications
are mind-boggling.

Our conceptual
understanding of the universe (of which we are all material
manifestations) changed from one that might be characterized as a
vast, relentless, grinding particle machine, to one that seems
almost, well… magical...

What other word will do?

As physicist Richard
Feynman noted,

"What I am going to
tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the
third or fourth year of graduate school… It is my task to
convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it.

You see my physics
students don't understand it… That is because I don't understand
it. Nobody does." 12

Yet to this day many
scientists continue to scoff at any understanding of physics beyond
the material boundaries of the classical interpretation, as if all
the advancements in quantum theory had never really taken place.

We are often lectured
that any sort of spiritual or religious belief we may hold are the
products of faith alone, discredited convictions rooted in either
medieval dogma or rank superstition; that they are simply not
scientific.

But today the truth of
the matter is actually the polar opposite, for it has been clearly
demonstrated that those individuals making these charges are the
ones trafficking in faith, in fact clinging to material dogmas that
physics has left behind in the dust.

Laplace's material cosmos
is now an intellectual relic of the past, overturned, not by faith,
but by science.

All is One in
the Entangled Universe
It seems to me, for a moment, then,

that the
seemingly limitless world of the observatory and the minute
world of quantum mechanics are far more than even light
years apart

For if the Big Bang began
with a singularity, as we are told, and a singularity that was
infinitely dense, then every particle that has ever emerged was
initially contained within this extraordinary particle of infinite
density, merged or forged or crushed in some magical way into this
one tiny something.

The seeds of our entire
universe were fused into that one, and if all were once one then is
it not reasonable to speculate that all were entangled at that
moment - if indeed it can even be described as a "moment" - and thus
quite possibly remain entangled to this day.

Suddenly, then, from this
perspective, the universe no longer appears to be an alien landscape
of far distant, whirling bodies at all, but rather a vast
masterpiece of infinite and instantaneous communication - of instant
knowing.

As Feynman suggests, what, precisely, the world of quantum mechanics
might ultimately be determined to be remains a mystery, and may well
remain a mystery some time to come, but what has already been
established is surely enough to reformulate our ideas about what the
universe is and how it functions.

For, while quantum
interactions cannot be observed, their effects can nonetheless be
experienced, and those experiences can be demonstrated
scientifically.

But for now the most important concept for us all to hold onto is
that of a vast and connected universe of instantaneous communication
and knowing, of a universe that begins to look far more like a
conscious organism than it does a grinding material
mechanism, and this is far more than mere layman's interpretation.

Indeed, it was the great British physicist Sir James Jeans
who penned the quote heading this article:

"The stream of human
knowledge is heading toward a non-physical reality. The universe
begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine."

This a view of reality
shared today by many physicists.

In all probability we
will not have all the answers to the true nature of the universe in
our lifetimes, but one thing does seem abundantly clear - the old
dogmas of material science have been proven relics of the past,
and a new concept of a foundationally conscious universe appears
clearly to be arising to take its place.

And there, in simple
terms, rests the case for human consciousness, for our compassion,
and the spirit that binds us all.